ULA: ‘There is nothing revolutionary about our policies’

Capitalist Austerity & Ireland’s Election

The following statement by the International Bolshevik Tendency was distributed in
Ireland in February.

Many bourgeois commentators are predicting a radically transformed political landscape
after this year’s election. The truth is, beyond the collapse of the Fianna
Fáil vote, little is likely to change. A Fine Gael-Labour coalition government,
despite minor tactical differences with its predecessor, would adhere to the conditions of
the EU/IMF bailout package and carry out major attacks on working people. Both parties are
committed to the service cuts and tax increases contained in Budget 2011 as well as the
other targeted assaults in the four-year plan, which is why they helped pass—rather
than block—the Finance Bill.

Sinn Féin has tried to project itself as a friend of working people with talk of
a wealth tax and spreading the pain over six, rather than four, years. North of the
border, where it shares power with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Sinn Féin
is busy implementing the cuts demanded by Westminster, and it makes no secret of the fact
that it would jump at the chance to join a coalition government here. RTE [Ireland’s
public broadcaster] interviewed Gerry Adams on 4 January and reported: “When asked
about the possibility of working in a coalition with [Labour leader Eamon] Gilmore, Mr
Adams said that if Sinn Féin could do business with Ian Paisley, it could do
business with anyone” (RTE [online], 5 January).

In November 2010 the United Left Alliance (ULA) was launched as an electoral bloc
between the Socialist Party (SP), the Workers and Unemployed Action Group (South
Tipperary) (WUAG) and the People Before Profit Alliance (PBPA), which is run by the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP):

“The newly formed United Left Alliance (ULA) is opposed to the
governments’ bailouts and the slash and burn policies which are only making the
crisis worse. In the general election we aim to provide a real alternative to the
establishment parties as well as Labour and Sinn Fein, who also accept the capitalist
market and refuse to rule out coalition with right wing parties.”—“Our Programme”, www.unitedleftalliance.org

The electoral platform of the ULA is a list of various unobjectionable demands, but it
does not contain a plan to mobilise effective mass resistance to the attacks, nor does it
point towards what is truly necessary—the socialist transformation of the economy.
It therefore falls far short of the type of fighting programme needed to address the
desperate situation facing Irish workers. The ULA does claim that it:

“Rejects so-called solutions to the economic crises based on slashing public
expenditure, welfare payments and workers’ pay. There can be no just or sustainable
solution to the crisis based on the capitalist market. Instead we favour democratic and
public control over resources so that social need is prioritised over profit.”—Ibid.

Any meaningful “democratic and public control” of the economy can only be
achieved through the expropriation of the capitalist class. But the ULA merely advocates a
progressive taxation system and a wealth tax, promising that if in power,
“corporation tax on the massive profits made in Ireland would be increased”.
Rather than calling for the expropriation of the expropriators, the ULA presumes the
indefinite continuation of capitalism—a social system which celebrates and
reinforces obscene social inequality and produces crises like the one we are living
through.

The ULA platform does at least reject “Social Partner-ship” and the Croke
Park deal [in which Ireland’s trade- union bureaucracy agreed to enforce class peace
until 2014]. It recognises:

“the urgent need to reclaim and rebuild the trade unions and to mobilise
the power of workers though [sic] mass action. The approach of Social Partnership has left
workers defenceless and has led to a massive transfer of wealth from workers to employers
and must be scrapped.

“Our elected TDs will give full support to those unions and workers who
oppose the Croke Park deal and will use the Dail to raise the real issues that affect
ordinary working people.”

But anyone serious about mobilising the power of workers through “mass
action” to take “the banks, finance houses, major construction companies and
development land into democratic public ownership and use them for the benefit of
people” (Ibid.)must reckon with furious resistance from the
capitalist class and its state apparatus. The bourgeois state (the bureaucracy, judiciary,
military and the Gardai) exists to defend privilege and wealth—just ask the Shell to
Sea activists, or the student demonstrators in Dublin last November, or the Thomas Cook
workers whose workplace occupation was attacked in 2009. But the ULA is silent on what
“public ownership” means in relation to the bourgeois state—does the ULA
advance the utopian fantasy that the capitalist state can be utilised to collectivise the
economy? If it is necessary to break up the existing state apparatus and create a new
state to serve and protect the interests of working people and the oppressed, why not say
so?

For Marxists, standing for parliament presents an opportunity to put forward ideas
(such as forming workers’ defence guards, expropriating the bosses and initiating
rational economic planning) to a much broader audience than is normally available. The
value of participating in capitalist electoral contests can be measured by the extent to
which they provide a chance to popularise the programme of revolutionary
socialism—the only alternative to the chaos of the capitalist market.

A serious socialist organisation can only be built on the basis of firm opposition to
all wings of the capitalist class. This is why Marxists uphold the principle of complete
working-class political independence from all bourgeois (and petty-bourgeois) parties.
Given the strong tendency towards coalition government that exists under the proportional
representation system (the Labour Party has only ever governed as a partner of either
Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael), this is a very important question. Yet the ULA pledges
only that:

“Alliance Oireachtas members will not give any support by voting or
abstaining to any government or proposed government, including a ‘national
government’, containing conservative parties including Fianna Fail or Fine
Gael.”—“Candidate Pledge”, www.unitedleftalliance.org

The bourgeois nationalist Sinn Féin is not included in this list because the ULA
would jump at the chance to join a “popular front” coalition with Sinn
Féin, Labour and a few “left” independents—an outcome that is
being seriously discussed as an outside possibility by some bourgeois commentators
(Independent [London], 5 December 2010). The ULA effectively rejects the
fundamental principle of working-class political independence by selecting only
“conservative” bourgeois parties for its critique—which is reason enough
for class-conscious workers not to vote for it.

The Socialist Party criticises its ULA partners (SWP/PBPA) for refusing to even mention
the word “socialism”:

“In the initial discussions which only involved the Socialist Party and
the PBPA, there was debate and disagreement between us, particularly with the SWP, on the
issue of whether an alliance should explicitly advocate socialist policies and socialism
as the solution to the crisis. The Socialist Party did not agree with the SWP’s view
that socialist policies would put people off from voting for candidates or from getting
involved in a left alliance.

“We felt it was very unfortunate that this argument was being put
forward at precisely the time when there is emerging, a new interest and need for
socialist policies because this is a crisis of the capitalist system
itself.”

. . .

“If the left believes that policies like taking over the wealth of
society and using it in a planned and productive way are necessary to create jobs, then it
makes sense to advocate them and try to win people to these ideas rather than obscure the
solution.”—“United Left Alliance to challenge at general
election”, 11 November 2010

A laudable sentiment in the abstract, but one not taken seriously enough by the SP to
prevent it from participating in the ULA and describing its programme as “a
fundamental alternative to the attacks on the living standards of ordinary people and
public services” (“General Election Challenge of United Left Alliance
Strengthens”, 14 January).

This is doubtless seen by some SP supporters as a clever tactic to engage with wider
layers of the working class at little or no political expense. But the real content of the
ULA’s programme was evident when Anne Foley, PBPA candidate for Cork North West, was
interviewed by a local newspaper:

“I feel the ULA has very common sense policies. When people think of
socialists, they think of communism, which is not the case. There is nothing dramatic or
revolutionary about our policies. A lot of countries have functioning social democracies,
especially in Scandinavia. They have great health, transport and childcare systems. This
is the direction we want to take, a direction this Government failed to follow.”—Cork Independent, 6 January

What the SP describes as a “fundamental alternative” to crisis-ridden
capitalism is nothing more than recycled social democracy. The ULA not only fails to
provide answers to the immediate tasks that confront workers faced with vicious attacks by
the bosses—it actively encourages illusions that parliamentary gradualism, rather
than hard class struggle, can provide a way out of the present impasse.

There has been talk of the ULA moving beyond an electoral lash-up, perhaps to initiate
a process leading to the creation of a new working-class party. This could indeed present
an important opportunity to discuss the revolutionary socialist programme that the working
class so desperately needs. But in this election the ULA must be judged on its current
programme and activity, and on that basis can only be described as a reformist
roadblock.

The capitalist class wants to offload all the costs of its crisis onto the backs of
working people. The present economic mess is not simply a product of bad decisions by
stupid or corrupt politicians and the short-sightedness of greedy bankers (though Ireland
has plenty of both) but rather of the systemic failure of the entire capitalist world
order, rooted in the profound irrationality of production for profit.

Instead of reformist fairy tales about the wonders of Scandinavian social democracy,
working people need an action programme that is based on the sort of class-struggle
tactics that can beat back the immediate attacks. They require a perspective that connects
militant resistance today to the necessity to forge a revolutionary workers’ party,
the only instrument capable of overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with an
egalitarian, socialist society geared towards meeting human need rather than maximizing
private profit.